I made a graph. I used GraphJam. It sums up an extraordinary blogging phenomena.
Update: I made a second graph.
Category: Consciousness
On the relationship between comments and effort
Psych out
I have to have a psychological test. All candidates for ministry have to go through a pretty rigorous vetting procedure.
It’s going to be fun. I hope there are ink blots.
Ultimately, wanting to go into Presbyterian Ministry seems to be the ultimate Catch 22 situation. The literal Catch 22 situation. As described by the novel that coined the phrase. Just slightly reversed – you have to be crazy to want to get in. Here’s the summary from Wikipedia…
The “Catch 22” is that “anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy”. Hence, pilots who request an evaluation are sane and must therefore fly in combat, but those who don’t request an evaluation don’t receive one and as a result can never be found insane, meaning they must also fly in combat. Catch-22, then, ensures that no pilot can ever be grounded for being insane – even if they are.
Sharing the love
I’ve given up on the daily link post. Feed readers will no doubt have noticed and appreciated this already. The multiple posting glitch was so very annoying for everybody. And it just ended up cluttering the page and obscuring the Curiosities posts I’d actually put effort into tracking down and writing up. So they’re gone. You will find my latest five shared items in the right hand column. If you want real time updates send an email to my gmail (which is n m dot(.) campbell at gmail.com – without the spaces, brackets and the word dot – you’ll figure it out, but spammers won’t) and become my friend on google reader.
Anyway, in the absence of a daily post of links here’s a post full of goodness from around the blogosphere – starting with five people I know in real life, and ending with five I’ve never met but who write funny, interesting or insightful stuff that I enjoy reading…
Those I know
- Izaac has finished his series on prophecy which is meaty, engaging and considerate of people with different learning styles (it has diagrams). He’s been blogging regularly for a couple of months now, and if you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon now’s your chance. Do it.
- Tim and Amy took on the blogging thing with gusto. And then slowed down. But they’re worth following because they’re pretty awesome.
- Geoff is another guy I’ve known for a long time – since we were kids taking the North Coast Christian camping scene by storm. He’s just started a blog. It looks promising thus far (he’s defined his scope pretty nicely).
- Dr Joel blogs infrequently but in a rantingly engaging way – and often giving an insight into life in the Queensland Health system…
- Tim has updated his blog twice this week. That’s some sort of record.
Those I don’t
- Jeff has thrown a couple of links my way – and you know that means he’s a purveyor of quality stuff…
- Guthers seems to be a man of great taste – beer and coffee. Awesome. He made a bit of a comeback this week after a two month break. Who knows if this return will be permanent – the fact that he writes about coffee regularly is enough for me.
- Reuben went toe to toe with me as we took on one of team pyro’s angry Calvinists on the death penalty a while back.
- Sam and Soph cover all the bases – coffee, Christianity, culture, journalism and they have a cracking white design. Like mine but without the clutter of columns. Rumour has it that Sam and Reuben were caught talking about this blog in a Moore College lecture the other day – I have spies everywhere people…
- Justin writes good stuff infrequently. He’s an Anglican minister in the heart of Sydney. He asks good questions. And provides good answers.
What’s in a name?
Today in Brisbane it is 28 degrees. A warm winters day. This gets everyone thinking about global warming and melting icebergs and imminent world destruction.
I think instead of worrying about climate change and carbon emission schemes we could just rename winter Second-Summer. If we change peoples expectations about what type of weather patterns should be occuring at what time of year by renaming the season people will worry less about warm august days. These would be a very normal occurence in Second-Summer. It’s all about perception.
A name change is a very cost-effective technique as it would only mean a change in a few thousand advertising/marketing techniques (eg. winter warmers would need a change) and to the calendars which have ‘winter’ marked on the 1st day of june. If there’s one thing Adam Smith taught its man wants whats cheapest, and wants lots of it. Clearly this option is more economically viable than trying to get everyone to reduce their use of harmful chemicals and pollutants that are seemingly destroying earth as we know it.
Also on the topic of climate change, im not a full skeptic, but i do wonder…i was taught that if an ice cube melts in a cup of water the water level stays the same (the ice cube weighs the same as liquid). So, if the icebergs are melting, wont the water level stay the same…i dont understand rising sea-levels. But, i have not researched this at all and i am sure people smarter than me have.
Anyway, i’ll keep you posted.
Location, Location
Robyn is pretty thrilled. A little bit of a furniture rearrangement has rescued our kitchen bench space (and given me a sore back).
We now have a little coffee island in the dining room – making use of a buffet that was previously a fishtank stand and place for general clutter.
I have a habit of buying coffee sacks wherever I can – and I’ve finally put them to some use.
If you’re in the area why not arrange a time to drop round for a coffee… if you’re not in the area, you can always visit…
One day I might get a coffee machine that’s designed for home use.
Seek, and you shall find…
Checking just how people end up visiting my blog is one of my favourite past times.
Today someone got here by googling this phrase:
"what to write on your fb status to make your husband mad and nobody else gets"
Sure enough, if you google it, my controversial post on status updates is there are suggested result number 2.
Sadly I don’t think this would be very helpful for this person. So here are some suggestions, for that one person out there.
- Thinks Bert Newton is the funniest man alive.
- has a headache.
- Is looking forward to an early night tonight.
- Misses her husband and wishes he wasn’t over the other side of the world (only works if he’s not over the other side of the world).
- Is only cooking dinner for one tonight.
- Bought heaps of new shoes and dresses today while her husband was at work.
- Did some spring cleaning today and threw out her husbands collection of ___ which she never really appreciated.
Any other suggestions. Lets help this poor soul out in the comments.
Post it post
I’ve been reading Daily Vowel Movements for a while. Since its Andrew became one of the many Andrews who comments here on occasion. It’s a blog with a nice regularity. You should check it out.
Friday is my favourite day, because on Fridays Andrew posts his pointless post it notes – which are every bit as amusing as the index card version they were inspired by. Here’s my favourite:
Double-take
i just wanted to share with you something i love. I love english words which have consecutive letters. I’m not sure why but there is something very nice about them especially writing them by hand. I also like words where one letter repeats a lot of times. Because of this love i have compiled a short story using as many of these words as i can in one sentence.
After much sleeplessness a committee of bookkeepers who were all addressees of the Mississippi region meet for an emergency meeting to discuss the suddenness of the need for theere to be less cheerlessness in their organisation, but because of some individual’s possessiveness their original keenness subsided and they left annoyed.
See, words with consecutive double letters are amazing, although sentences containing 14 of them are less impressive.
The perils of popularity
You may have noticed that my blog goes down occasionally. Hightek Hosting, my shared webhost, is a pretty awesome hosting company – and it turns out I’ve been causing headaches for all the other people on my server.
Here’s an email I received from the host today – my server’s name is Zeus.
Thanks to some smart and watchful technicians overnight, it appears that we’ve finally tracked down the cause of the constant Zeus Up/Down issues…and unfortunately, yes, it is your site causing them.
Basically, in short, your site fired up a bucketload of apache services and obviously fired them all at MySQL, causing an astronomincal load increase to the point of which we basically have to reboot the server to get it back online.
Now, I don’t know what a lot of that jargon means – but in short, I’m too popular for my own good.
No they’re not.
As promised in my last post the following discussion is about a serious fashion crime that is being committed way too often.
LEGGINGS ARE NOT PANTS.
Exceptions are made when you wear a dress or skirt over the top. Or are working out at the gym or you are a world champion at gym or bike riding or ice-skating – then you can wear leggings as pants but only whilst you compete.
That is all.
Kick it to meme
Well, Anna from goannatree tagged me in a meme. Let me just say that I think meme is a stupid word. But I’ve never been tagged in a meme before – not even the stupid ones on Facebook. So I’ll do it. I have to: “share the titles and authors of 15 books that will stay with you, or have stayed with you. You are to write this list in less than 15 minutes.”
This will probably show me up as the trashy “pop culture” reader that I am… and I probably deserve it. Actually, I decided to pad out the list with impressive sounding books that I remember… I cheated really.
Sadly, other than the Bible, I really struggle to finish Christian books – they’re often hundreds of pages talking about an idea that could be summed up in a nice, concise, blog post.
Right, here goes.
- The Bible – well, that’s not trashy – author God, and various human agents.
- The Godfather – Mario Puzo.
- The Assassins trilogy – Robin Hobb.
- The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse – Robert Rankin.
- The Hobbit – Tolkien (I can remember as a child walking into Gould Books in Newtown – featured in Ben’s post yesterday and asking if they had Lord of the Rings by J R R R R Tolkien – which they did (without the extra Rs), and I bought it, sans cover and the cover was replaced with masking tape and a Coco Pops box – but the Hobbit was my first love).
- The Thursday Next series – Jasper Fforde.
- The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli.
- 1984 – George Orwell.
- All of David Baldacci’s trashy airport novels.
- All of Conn Iggulden’s historical fiction books about Caesar and Genghis Kahn.
- The Daily Scribe – my first year journalism textbook.
- Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
- Almost everything by Ben Elton
- The Little Book of Bunny Suicides – Andy Riley
- I just read a great trilogy about assassins by Brent Weeks that I really enjoyed. They were almost unputtdownable. People who like Fantasy and enjoyed Robin Hobb’s Assassin series should check them out.
You are all now tagged. Feel free to put your list here in the comments – or on your own blog, but make sure you put a link to your post in said comments…
Just so you know…
You really should check out my latest phone call from Dr Paul/Interpol Ghana. It’s in the scambaiting section.
2,000
This is the 2000th post on this blog. That’s impressive by any measure.
217 of these have been about Christianity.
98 have been about coffee.
291 have been about communication.
337 have been about culture.
90 have been about sport.
619 have been curious things from around the internet.
648 have been about life in the Campbell household.
35 have been links from my Google Reader (since I changed the category they went in to)
And 30 have been me trying to get a photo out of Nigerian scammers.
You might notice that doesn’t add up to 2,000. That’s because some categories overlap.
118 of these posts were made in 2006
90 were made in 2007
258 were made in 2008
1534 were made this year.
So humble reader – have you got a favourite? Have you never commented before? Use this as an opportunity to tell me what it is you’d like to see more of around these parts.
Oh, and check out my very first ever post in its original context…
Oh yeah, and I’ve used 4,010 tags and received 3,879 comments.
57 comments came from Simone.
252 from Stuss.
359 from Leah.
310 from Amy.
61 from Ben.
39 from Mark.
I’ve made 512.
If you want to know how many you’ve made – let me know.
Quiztastic
Just so you know – Ben writes awesome quizzes.
I’m not going to try to steal his thunder with a quiz of my own. But they seem to turn readers into commenters in an effective manner. You should check them out. Even if it’s just for the cool cartoon he draws for each one – and the chance to learn about other people from the blogosphere.
Dear Lurker
Ben is very wise. He says I shouldn’t try to scare you out of hiding. But I’ve always been a little hot headed and impetuous. So I’m going to temporarily ignore his wise advice and try to attract further lurkers out of the shadows.
Over in the comments thread on that post – one Mr Rodeo Clown – informed me that he lurks occasionally but isn’t a regular because he is intimidated by the frequency of posts.
I guess that makes me the Sizzler of the blog world – which is fitting, because this is one of my most popular posts of all time.
What say you, humble lurker, would you read more if I wrote less?
August 18, 2009